The Smol Bean Emperor

Sarah Monette’s The Goblin Emperor is political fantasy—but not in a good way.

by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez

Fantasy, as a genre, should be subversive: not limited by real-world constraints, its only limits those of the author’s imagination. Imagine the history-altering effect of The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark, where the Haitian Revolution succeeded; or China Mieville including an Embassy to Hell in the diplomatic quarter of Perdido Street Station’s city of Bas-Lag; or Ursula K. Le Guin’s protagonist in A Wizard of Earthsea not fighting his Shadow in an epic showdown, but merely recognizing and accepting it as part of himself.

And it’s exactly because of this potential to imagine radical change and radical worlds that I found Sarah Monette’s 2014 novel The Goblin Emperor so lacking. Set in a steampunk elfland, the novel follows the rise of half-goblin Maia as he grows from an all-but-exiled Imperial Heir to his eventual coronation as Emperor Edrahasivar VII, following an airship crash that claims the lives of Maia’s father (the emperor) and those of every other potential heir within the line of succession.

The novel weaves together three main narratives, flowing from courtly intrigue to bildungsroman to whodunit in order to maintain a good pace. Not all of these elements are equally executed. The coming-of-age story is charming, allowing us to see how Maia grows into his position. And given the abuse he suffered at his cousin’s hand, it’s satisfying to see him choose to be kind and compassionate with his staff while also learning who doesn’t deserve his trust and support. The courtly intrigue portions, on the other hand—which delight in describing the lavish dress and ornamentation—dragged. 

The whodunit, though, is by far the weakest thread. An investigation into the airship crash that jumpstarted the events of the novel, it feels like an afterthought, as well as the moment where the thin veneer of “kindness as politics” that suffuses the entire novel completely falls apart.

The unspooling of this plot depends on a personal quest on the part of our hero Maia, which leads to further contortions of ideology.

Setting aside the fact that once a politician assumes power they often choose to turn a blind eye towards whatever anomalies put them in power, the unspooling of this plot depends on a sort of personal quest on the part of our hero Maia, one from which he sees no real benefit and which ultimately leads to further contortions of ideology to justify.

After visiting the mass funeral for all the crew aboard the airship, Maia decides to investigate why the crash happened. But apart from distrusting his minister, there’s little external pressure to investigate the crash: the late emperor wasn’t liked by many at court. Likewise, there was little public outcry (though, since Maia doesn’t seem to leave the palace much, this might be unclear). Nevertheless, he hires a “Witness for the Dead” (which seems to fill the roles of detective, lawyer and religious inquisitor in equal parts) to pursue the investigation, much of which takes place off-stage, with Maia receiving and reading the Witness’s letters.

Late in the book (chapter 28 of 35), the investigation turns to the factory town of Amalo, which we’re told is dedicated to the building and repair of airships. And it’s here that a conspiracy is uncovered: it turns out that many of the town’s workers follow the teachings of a disfavored philosopher, who teaches that gods are societal constructs, people seek out social standing or power to aspire to godhood, and that power can and should be taken from those who seek to do nothing with it. The story refers to this as the Doctrine of Universal Ascendance, and it’s broadly accepted among the working class in Amalo.

In his letter, the investigator scoffs:

“. . . Most of them do not follow [the philosophy] to the logical conclusion, that they should take power from their supervisors or the owners of the airship company or the Prince. . . but they like to feel that they would be justified in doing so. . .”

Later in the same letter (which takes up almost half the chapter), the Witness for the Dead meets the handful of true believers who he suspects were responsible for planting the time-bomb that caused the crash. He’s led there by a worker who “. . . did not regard Universal Ascendance as something hypothetical or something that would doubtless take place, but in the far distant future. For [him], it was going to happen soon. . .” It bears mentioning that this is the first time in the novel that anyone who’s not a noble or an imperial functionary is depicted.

The Goblin Emperor is a book of a particular ideology: namely, a sort of kinder, gentler neoliberalism, nominally progressive and forward-thinking while cannily avoiding more difficult questions of power, and oppression, and exploitation. It’s a book where individual hardship can be resolved with the wave of an emperor’s hand, but larger, systemic injustices—the ones an emperor might actually be uniquely if unjustly positioned to solve—are met with a shrug, at best, or more often a patronizing justification.

In this context, what is obviously a worker-led revolutionary philosophy is viewed not only as ridiculous, but dangerous. The Witness for the Dead is the first to admit that conditions in the factory town are dire: disease and starvation are not just widespread in Amalo, but more widespread across the empire. And yet any action on the part of the workers is framed as extreme and dangerous. We know this because the workers’ first action is one of escalation—not rooted in prior activism, such as negotiations or strikes—all in service of maintaining the narrative centered on how Maia inherited the empire’s problems.

The Goblin Emperor is a book of a particular ideology: namely, a sort of kinder, gentler neoliberalism.

When Maia at last meets the three people who claim they masterminded the bombing, they are presented not as people whose wants have routinely gone unheard and who may have justified reasons for pursuing their goals with extreme methods, but as unhinged zealots. For all its nods to how sad the workers’ conditions are in the text, this depiction of revolutionary workers as completely irrational shows where text’s support truly lies: an unacceptable, unchanging status quo.

“[Maia said] ‘No. It is not worth the price.’

“‘Twenty-three lives,’ Shulivar said. ‘Do you know how many people the factories of Choharo and Rosiro and Sevezho kill in a year? In a month?’

“‘But I haven’t–‘

“‘You will,’ said Shulivar, and his eyes were blue, serene and utterly mad. . .”

What’s particularly insulting is that the conspirators are depicted as not just philosophically misguided, but as useful idiots for the noble families who don’t want a half-goblin like Maia on the throne. The text doesn’t even entertain the notion that the workers could have organized and taken action on their own initiative, instead depicting them as needing guidance from the ruling class to take any action in the interests of their own liberation. 

And then comes another kicker: Maia decides to execute the three workers who claim responsibility. This would be more understandable if Maia had acted to improve his working-class subject’s lives—he did not (and does not). This narrative oversight turns Maia from a charming leader who’s insufficient to the task at hand to an outright monster who’s more interested in interpersonal kindness than justice. Being nice, after all, is quite different than being good.

These types of moments—affirmations of Maia as a nice person, but not necessarily a good person—are scattered throughout the earlier parts of the novel. Again and again we see Maia being personally kind to another person, helping out the less well off, the less privileged—yet all without ever questioning why tradition must be followed or acknowledging his (or his government’s) role in driving these people to the very circumstances that he helps them tolerate. One example has Maia seeking out his old nursemaid, only to find she’s in failing health and barely able to speak due to a “brainstorm” (elfland’s version of a stroke, one supposes). Her daughter is now teetering on poverty, despite her family’s position in the court, and when Maia asks her what he can do to help, she asks for coal:

‘Coal?’

‘It’s been so cold,’ she said, half-apologetic and half despairing. ‘And the price of coal keeps rising and rising. And Mother is cold all the time, even when the rooms seem comfortable to us. We should take her south, but she cannot travel, and, Serenity, we would not ask it, but we are desperate, and you asked if there was anything, and this truly would make mother more comfortable–‘

‘We will see to it,’ Maia said, and Osmin Danivin curtsied so deeply and thanked him so repeatedly that he was grateful to be able to leave. . .”

This chapter ends with, “. . . the Emperor Edrehasivar VII went to bed, where he slept badly.”

When Maia does exert power, it’s to uphold a status quo whose inhumanity is skillfully kept out of frame by the author.

Again, Maia’s impulse to repay his old nursemaid’s long-ago kindness is an unalloyed good, but merely on an interpersonal level. He never makes the next logical leap to wonder how many other subjects also suffer cold due to rising fuel prices—something that if nothing else seems to indicate his inadequacy to the task of governance.

For someone with his level of power (in a fantasy novel, no less!), Maia barely exerts any power at all. When he does, it’s to uphold a status quo whose inhumanity is skillfully kept out of frame by the author. Consider: all women in the court are almost chattel, belonging to their families or Houses. Upon learning this, does Maia (whose own mother was mistreated and neglected by the late emperor) do anything to try to emancipate them? No, because it’s an old tradition. By keeping his scope narrow in this way, Maia claims kindness while following the same rules that marginalize and oppress others. It brings to mind one of No Country For Old Men‘s best lines:  “If the rule you followed led to this, of what use was the rule?”

Comparing shy and courteous Maia to cold and murderous Anton Chigurh may seem hyperbolic. Then again, an emperor’s smallest movement can wipe out vast numbers of lives, putting even the most diligent killers to shame. It then seems appropriate that by the end of the book, instead of wanting to change the lives of his people for the better, Edrehasivar VII instead chooses to build a literal bridge between two rival factions. This is supposed to be a hopeful ending.

Going back to fantasy as the subversive genre, it’s worth considering The Goblin Emperor’s antecedents. While Lord of the Rings is a reactionary work, Tolkien’s fantasy offers a vision of an alternate way history could have taken. Through Hobbiton, he offers a vision of what a Britain that had never suffered the industrial revolution could have looked like. The Shire is self-sufficient and has almost no police force because the community has little need of them.

If this seems fantastical, it’s precisely because it should be! In contrast, what vision of an alternate way does The Goblin Emperor offer? As a fantasy novel, it fails to offer an alternative. It fails even based on Monette’s own criteria:

“. .  . The idea mutated a little, but it’s still the core: a boy who has no experience of court is now the emperor and has to deal. In this book, if you make your decisions with compassion and ethics, things will work out.”

Even if this statement were true, the question remains, work out for whom? Because the answer doesn’t appear to be “the workers.”

One major clue to this enormous oversight on the part of a novel that has been widely praised for its handling of fantasy politics comes from when it was written. Monette began writing The Goblin Emperor around 2009, right around the same time as the beginning of the Obama presidency: an era when, like The Goblin Emperor, we were told that being nice could lead directly to being good. 

Just as speculative fiction is almost always the product of its time, it’s hard not to feel the lingering influence of the Obama years in The Goblin Emperor’s politics and world. From the clumsy racial commentary of “white” elves and “black” goblins, to referencing the then-candidate’s speech on building new bridges, to the idea that a leader’s personal kindness alone is enough to bring justice, and the many times Maia is tortured by a tough decision, the novel serves as apologia both for its own fantasy empire and our real-world one. There’s not a vision of change, just the defense of tradition and status quo.

If The Goblin Emperor were genuinely interested in providing a different way, any one of the examples above could have been material for an entire novel’s worth of story of political action and attempts to improve people’s material conditions. Barring that, the only other tolerable ending would have been Maia renouncing his throne in order to dismantle the empire.

Addison’s next novel The Witness for the Dead follows Maia’s investigator, now estranged from the Imperial Court and living in the town of Amalo. As this seems to be a mystery and not a direct sequel, we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the dismantling of the empire—but don’t hold your breath.

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